Slideshow: The Snow Mountain Music Festival part 1

[showtime]
Battleground for yet another contest in the eternal battle for the right to party, the Snow Mountain Music Festival's run from October 3-5 pitted the cranky old rheumatic gods of fog and rain against the much flightier, and sadly much less enduring, gods of music—the crappy weather gods giving the music gods the beat down of a lifetime.
As a result, the SMMF was a festival that fell well short of its projected attendance, the god-awful weather having a nefariously inhibiting effect on the crowd. Nevertheless, there were many junctures at which the crowd looked ready to get seriously crazy (as they should at an outdoor concert).
There was the point at which they nearly managed to overrun the army-detachment defended security barricade, and the point where a sole crowd surfer was able to summit a wave of hands for a moment before being betrayed by the wetness of his skin and slipping head first into the crowd—never to be seen again (at least not by me).
Despite skies that alternated between the color of newborn baby puke and coal-fortified gruel and on-and-off deluges that catalyzed the transformation of green fields into half-chewed-lamb-kebab-looking sludge, the festival did manage to please the crowds. It also provided a lot of bands that otherwise would have few alternative performance venues with a stage on which to rock out and audiences to perform to.
The result was a mixed bag of permanently mud-stained clothes, close calls with hypothermia, great music and moshing purely for the sake of keeping warm. All told, a very memorable experience.
Go on to part 2 of the Snow Mountain Music Festival slideshow